The present invention relates to mobile platforms for enterprise applications.
With a growing reliance on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, many companies are offering their enterprise software applications on mobile platforms to enable users to utilize their applications on their mobile devices. However, finding and downloading mobile applications is a cumbersome endeavor. In an enterprise setting, in order to download a mobile application on a smartphone or tablet, a user needs to know a path for an application store where the mobile applications are hosted. Alternatively, the information technology (IT) department of a given enterprise can help install the applications on the user's mobile devices. There are several problems with this traditional approach to providing mobile platforms for enterprise applications.
For example, the user is typically unaware of whether a mobile platform for a given enterprise application is even available. Even if a user knows that a mobile version of the desired enterprise application is available, he or she may be in a rush, therefore manually searching for the application or asking an IT department to help may be out of the question. From an enterprise perspective, IT administrators would need to individually install the mobile application on each device, which is extremely time consuming and tedious.
Moreover, users may need to remotely access files associated with a software application using a mobile device so they can view and/or modify the files when they are away from their personal computer. However, in order to use a mobile device to access/modify files located on their personal computer, the user must either manually enter the address of the file in the mobile device or search for the file based on his/her knowledge of the database the file is located within.